


I've A Call

by Sylvestris



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Drama, Fix-It, Gen, Major Illness, Organized Crime, Post-Canon, Post-Felina, Recovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-05-23 01:31:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6100414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylvestris/pseuds/Sylvestris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.<br/>I have given my day-clothes up to the nurses<br/>And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.</p><p>(Sylvia Plath, "Tulips")</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've wanted to write this fic for a long time, but it didn't start to take shape until I read Laura Fraser's amazing post-finale headcanon for Lydia, which you can find [here](http://mashable.com/2015/09/29/breaking-bad-actors/#bKhWGN8hJSqF).
> 
> Some dialogue in this chapter is taken from "Felina", written by Vince Gilligan.

“You’d be doing him a favour.”

Lydia tears open her first packet of stevia, releasing a wisp of white powder that drifts and disappears into the steam. She breathes in the tawny floral scent of the tea and tries to calm her nerves. Walt coming here, today, feels like an invasion. She never did feel at ease working with him; it was one thing when he was prepared to act professionally, but now? The man’s a wreck. If he’s come back to Albuquerque after six months on the run, his mind can’t be what it used to be; either that or he simply has a death wish and wants to be noticed when he dies, which possibility makes Lydia even more reluctant to be anywhere near him. Feeling Todd’s eyes on her, she stirs in another dose of stevia and takes a sip.

She used to think a lot about poison. She used to think so much about it that she bought ipecac and activated charcoal for her medicine cabinet and wouldn’t drink anything that wasn’t poured in front of her. There was that board meeting where she sat for ninety minutes nursing an untouched glass of water. There was that time when she debated whether or not to take the pills she’d just picked up from the pharmacy because the seal on the bottle felt loose. Eventually the fear ebbed away, like they always do. You can, in fact, be too careful. Just because her sympathetic nervous system is on high alert and has flagged up Walt as a threat and Todd as a threat and every other driver on the road from her hotel as a threat doesn’t mean she’s actually in danger; she has told herself this so many times that it’s worn a groove in her mind. Still, it strikes her that the tea doesn’t taste quite like it should; it’s not sweet enough, and there’s a dusty note, and she can taste the hot water; but the idea that drinking tea could somehow kill her is exactly the kind of thought her mind likes to generate when she’s uncomfortable, and if she obeyed all those little impulses she’d never leave her house. Todd sits across from her, placid, solid. She feels around him that if she ever tried to run he could simply put his hand around her wrist and she wouldn’t be able to move an inch.

“So, uh…” Todd begins, and although he looks like he finally gets her drift, Lydia feels a flash of irritation and fear. Surely he knows not to say it out loud.

“Call me when it’s done,” she says, looking him firmly in the eye to make sure he understands, and he nods. She takes another sip of the tea and tells herself she’s just imagining the unusual taste, just rattled from Walt showing up; still, she has no desire to prolong this meeting. She nudges the bag of money at her feet towards Todd, places a five-dollar bill on the table, and picks up her sunglasses.

“Okay,” says Todd softly, and Lydia suppresses a shudder at the note of disappointment in his voice. “Well, uh, it was good seeing you. Same time next week?”

“We’ll see,” Lydia says. _Ten a.m., every Tuesday morning, you and I met here_ is still ringing in her head, and her face burns with the thought that she made herself so easy to find. “We might have to vary the schedule a little from now on. Meet somewhere else, perhaps. I’ll let you know.”

“Sure,” Todd says, as she’s scraping back her chair. “Take care.”

 

This is the shape her life takes now: crises come one after another like beads on a string. She’ll be glad to be rid of Walter White for good, but he did, perhaps, have a point about the methylamine. Things aren’t the way they were a couple of years ago; shipping the stuff from Houston to Albuquerque one drum at a time will be doable, but hardly easy. If she can perhaps reconnect with some of Gus’ old contacts on the Pacific coast, new pipelines might open up, but business in that part of the world is too fraught with politics for her liking. She doesn’t have his light touch.

As Lydia makes her way through the airport, her unease coalesces into a tension headache, a dull, diffuse pounding that starts in her temples and spreads to the base of her skull. At least it’s not a migraine, she thinks; one of those could knock her flat for hours at a stretch, and she’s already lost half a working day to the tedious matter of handing over the money. She takes a couple of Advil and half an Ativan in the departure lounge, and wonders if she should eat something to settle her stomach. All she’s had today is two cups of tea in her hotel room and what little she drank at the restaurant; she never eats well when she’s travelling, plus the way Todd looks at her sends jolts of adrenaline into her solar plexus and kills any appetite she might have had. They say it’s adaptive. Your body shuts down non-essential processes and concentrates on immediate survival. The only problem comes when it kicks in when it’s not needed. She’s learned to tolerate it; it’s amazing what you can tolerate when you have no other choice.

The Ativan takes the edge off, but she still doesn’t feel right. During the flight, the headache works its way into her neck and back, making her shift restlessly in her cramped, unergonomic seat, and her throat feels dry no matter how much water she sips. She coughs nervously into the crook of her elbow and tries to distract herself with the view. The landscape thirty-six thousand feet beneath them is barren and brilliant, the kind of place where you could survive a plane crash and then die of exposure. She used to think a lot about plane crashes, too. She still does.

By the time they land, she’s shivering in the leaden September heat and coughing loudly enough to turn heads, but she doesn’t have long to dwell on it; the flat-screens at the departure gates are broadcasting CNN and she stops dead in her tracks when the words MANHUNT UNDERWAY FOR WALTER WHITE scroll past. The anchor is talking to a reporter in Albuquerque. There have been sightings of Walt all over the city. There’s talk of traffic sifting and police roadblocks. There are shots of the boarded-up house where he used to live, where his neighbour claims she saw him just this morning. Lydia stares at the screen, frozen, feeling as if everyone in the terminal is seeing through her. If the police get to Walt before he can get to Jack, she’s done for. 

The concourse spins chaotically around her, and for a moment she’s certain she’s going to fall, but it passes. She reorients herself and heads for the exit, her heels clicking too loudly on the wide polished floor.

 

“Ma’am? Where to?”

“What?” Lydia murmurs, lifting her head from the cab window. She doesn’t remember starting to lean against it. She’s not sure she remembers getting into the cab.

“Where do you want to go?” the driver repeats, enunciating each word carefully, like he thinks she can’t understand English.

“Oh… Aldine. Madrigal Loop,” Lydia says, though she wants nothing more than to go home and lie down on the cool slate of her bathroom floor. “Please.”

Anxiety can manifest itself as all kinds of physical symptoms, as she well knows. She’s used to constant low-level headaches, to sudden dizzy spells, to the insidious knots of pain that work their way into the muscles of her back when she holds herself tense for too long. She’s used to sometimes not being able to keep anything down except sips of tea and granola bars. She carries on anyway. It takes her a while to consider that she might actually be physically ill, and at first she rejects that possibility because it’s just so goddamned inconvenient. Today, of all days. She has a strategy meeting with the sustainability workgroup at half past three and a long list of calls to return, and she’s barely been in her office five minutes before Teresa knocks at her door, carrying a sheaf of reports.

“Lydia? I typed up those quarterlies. I figured you’d want to look at them before St. Clair gets here.”

“Yes, absolutely. Thank you.”

The columns of figures are a welcome distraction, although the text swims when she tries to read it and it hurts to move her eyes. She settles for highlighting the most useful parts, then retreats to the bathroom to neaten her hair and make-up. One look in the mirror tells her she’s undeniably coming down with something, though she does her best to make it less obvious, dabbing Touche Éclat under her eyes and adding colour to her lips and cheeks. Her hands are clammy and cold, which will be harder to hide, and she’s trembling. 

“We’re in 5B today,” Teresa tells her when she emerges. “Back in the greenhouse. Oh, and I made sure the guys from Long Beach CC’ed you in on that terminal management thing.”

“The software issue? That’s still happening?”

“I guess so.”

The reflected light in the glass elevator jars her temples. Maybe she’ll get lucky and the meeting won’t drag on for too long, though with this group the best she can hope for is to be done in an hour. She made sure that everyone had her report a week in advance, and she’s not in the mood to restate what she’s already made clear. It contains, among other things, a set of measures which Jay St. Clair, her counterpart from the petrochemical division, has been trying to block for the past five months. Lydia has no interest in locking horns with him again; she’s done the working and the figures are on her side, as everyone in his party would know if they’d taken the time to read the thing.

By half past four, Lydia finds herself longing for an urgent phone call that would get her out of the room. The negotiations are crawling along, and she’s been coughing and sweating and shivering for the past hour; she must cut a pathetic figure, though no one’s acknowledging it.

“I’m confident that…” she starts, and loses patience. “Look at this. Page six, items twelve through fifteen, we implement them all, they add up to a sixteen-point reduction in CO2 and projected savings over a billion dollars. I don’t know how much clearer I can make it.”

St. Clair is about to respond when Lydia nearly doubles over coughing. Awkward glances flit around the table. She grabs the glass of water in front of her before anyone can offer it to her, and gradually, the spasms stop.

“Excuse me,” Lydia mutters, hoarse. “As I was saying: we can’t expect the spread between Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate to close any time soon, which makes it all the more important for us to open up these transportation bottlenecks. We all stand to benefit from this.”

St. Clair and his associates exchange looks. The woman on his right nods.

“Number fifteen, I guess that’s the sticking point for us,” he says. “I mean, you said yourself, we aren’t going to see these savings until… and you’re still dead against a Keystone buy-in?”

“Yes,” Lydia says. “There’s too much uncertainty there. Not that it’s my call to make, ultimately, but… we can improve capacity without committing to a pipeline that might not even make it to Houston in the end, and—”

She coughs again, worse than before, her lungs seizing up until she’s dizzy from lack of air. Bright lights are speckling her field of vision, but she can see St. Clair looking at her with narrowed eyes, perplexed or concerned; she slides one of the sheets of paper Teresa gave her across the table to him, pointing shakily with her pen at the annotations she’s made.

“Those are the latest quarterlies,” Lydia says. “Those are my projections. I can show you the working if you want.”

St. Clair studies the numbers, looking back and forth between Lydia’s notes and the report, leafing from page to page.

“Can I get a copy of these?” he asks, finally, and Lydia knows she’s won.

She makes her way through the gauntlet of handshakes and chatter and hurries back toward her office. Her relief that the meeting’s over is undercut by the weakness that swept over her as soon as she stood, threatening to knock her off her feet. Teresa’s at her side, talking about when to schedule her next meeting with St. Clair, but her voice is blurred and Lydia’s thinking about how long it will take her to clear her inbox, how many of those phone calls she can hold off on returning until tomorrow. She doesn’t see herself getting out of the office until seven or eight at this rate. Her joints are aching fiercely with every step she takes.

“You want me to fix that right now?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your meeting.” They’ve reached Teresa’s cubicle. “You want me to pencil it in for next Monday? I’m pretty sure you’ve got noon to two-thirty free.”

“Oh.” Lydia’s sure she’s right, but her head is spinning and it’s taking all the self-control she has not to lean on the divider or sink into the nearest chair. “Could you give me ten minutes? I just want to check that against my…”

She gestures weakly toward her office, and Teresa nods, but looks at her curiously.

“Are you feeling okay, Lydia? You, uh… that cough sounded pretty bad…”

“I’m fine. Just… ten minutes.”

The door shuts safely behind her, but she’s fumbling with the cord that closes the blinds when a wave of nausea rolls over her and the room’s gravity seems to shift, knocking her off balance. Something heavy crashes to the ground as she stumbles, reaching for her desk, scattering papers, and the next thing she knows she’s lying flat on the floor with several people clustered around her, and Teresa’s shaking her shoulders and calling her name.

“Lydia? Oh, my God, are you all right?”

“Just give me a second,” Lydia mumbles, dazed. Someone thrusts a paper cup of water to her lips; she tries to drink but ends up coughing again, uncontrollably. “Oh, my God… okay, okay…”

She pushes herself up in an attempt to get air into her lungs, and notices the vase from her desk lying on its side in a spreading patch of water, its single flower spilled. One of the people crouching behind her is talking about calling 911.

“No,” Lydia says, as forcefully as she can. “No. I’m… I… I just got dizzy, that’s all.”

“Could y’all give her a little space?” Teresa says, and the others draw back. She reaches out to touch Lydia’s forehead with a matter-of-factness that takes Lydia by surprise. “Oh, honey, you’re burning up… have you been like this all day?”

Leaning against her desk, Lydia feels at once embarrassed and oddly touched by her attention, torn between flinching away and letting herself be comforted.

“It started on the plane,” she says, trying to straighten up. “I kept thinking it was just… I don’t know… I mean, I had a flu shot…”

She can’t quite grasp why she’s feeling so terrible all of a sudden, but there must have been something. Traces of a virus on the armrest of her seat on the plane, maybe. Something she shouldn’t have eaten or drunk or touched or done.

“You mean you had one _today_?"

“No, I mean, I… I had the shot, so I shouldn’t…”

“Well, they’re not a hundred per cent,” Teresa says. “Look, if you need a ride home, I can take you right now."

“Seriously?”

“Of course. Just take a few minutes, let me finish up and we’ll go.”

It occurs to her as she’s being led out of the building, with light knifing into her eyes and Teresa’s hand tight around her arm, that there might be something really wrong with her— she hasn’t been this sick in years, she takes an array of preventative supplements, she washes her hands assiduously— but the thought soon fades along with everything else. She slumps into the passenger seat of Teresa’s car and sinks into a hazy half-sleep before they’ve even left the parking lot.

“Lydia? Is this you?”

Lydia blinks, shading her eyes from the pinkish afternoon light. Teresa has pulled up outside her house, and she notes that Delores’ car is in the driveway already; it must be later than she thought.

“Oh. Yeah.”

She plants her feet carefully on the ground, her stiff joints protesting, and tries to clear her head, but her vision narrows down again and she nearly trips over the curb. Teresa grabs hold of her arms and seems to stare down at her from a great height; Lydia tries to focus on her face.

“Lydia, honey, you look really sick.”

“I’m sure it’s just the flu,” Lydia mumbles, although she’s not sure any more. It could be pneumonia, or meningitis. What’s that test they do? Maybe she should check herself for a rash. She coughs into the crook of her arm, wobbling on her feet. Teresa walks her to her door and gives her that uneasy look again, like she’s not sure whether she should have taken Lydia home or to urgent care.

“You take care now, okay? Don’t come in tomorrow unless you’re feeling better.”

“I’ll get some rest,” Lydia says, to placate her. She thinks again of all those calls she was meant to return, but she’s been longing to crawl into bed for hours now. Nothing could feel better than slipping in between cool sheets and curling up with her aches and pains until whatever this is goes away. “Thank you, Teresa. This is… it’s kind of you.”

“Don’t worry about it. Go get some sleep.”

Kiira comes running as soon as she steps inside, delighted that she’s come home so early, and Lydia bends down to hug her as best she can while keeping her distance. She had her flu shot as well, but that’s little reassurance. She’ll be worried about Kiira catching this until it’s over; yet another thing weighing on her mind.

“Hey, sweetie. I can’t give you a kiss today. I don’t want you to get sick.”

Kiira stares up at her, concerned. As a compromise, Lydia ruffles her hair.

“Buenas tardes, Delores,” she adds, slipping off her shoes and jacket. “I’m home early, I guess.”

Delores looks her up and down, her brow creased. “You got sick at work?”

“It came on all of a sudden. Feels like the flu.” Lydia pads into the kitchen and washes her hands, wondering if there are still extra-strength painkillers in the medicine cabinet. “I think I’m just gonna go straight to bed.”

Instead, she crumples into the nearest corner of the sofa; her knees don’t seem to want to hold her up any more. All she did was walk inside, and yet her chest feels tight and her heart is hammering. When she opens her eyes, Delores is hovering nearby, looking even more concerned.

“Do you want anything? I was just going to make her dinner, I could heat up some soup, or…”

“Maybe some of that tea,” Lydia says, leaning back and trying to breathe steadily. “The herbal stuff, in the orange box. Thank you.”

Delores is moving around in the kitchen, opening drawers. “This one?”

“Yeah.”

“If you go on to bed, I can bring it through.”

 

Yet she can’t sleep. She tosses and turns in the too-light room until the sheets wrap around her like twine. She can hear her heartbeat when she lays her head on the pillow, rapid and insistent. She drifts off and wakes up coughing and drenched in sweat, disoriented, unmoored in time. There’s an odd pressure in her chest, like she’s trying to breathe water. Her ribs could be the frail white roots of a plant, easily snapped and severed. And then there’s Todd. She still has to wait for Todd’s call, to make sure they’ve done what was agreed. The phone tucked under her pillow still hasn’t rung.

It goes on until she gives up and drags herself out of bed, shivering, to put on her cashmere robe. She crawls back under the covers with her laptop to attempt to do some work, but flicks from one page to another without really reading anything. Against her better judgement, she clicks over to CNN. Walter White is still their top story, a fact which makes her heart lurch against her ribcage. She reminds herself that she’s been through this before, when Gus died, and she got away cleanly then, but she can’t remember how. She had Mike then to guide her through those first few nightmarish weeks, and now she’s on her own.

She clicks on articles about the wildfires near Austin, more bombings in Pakistan, something about the overvaluation of the Swiss franc relative to the euro, trying to make it look to anyone who might subpoena her internet service provider like she’s just checking up on current events, like she has no particular interest in the manhunt currently underway for one of the FBI’s most wanted. At least The Grove doesn’t have security cameras; she made sure of that the first time she entered. There’s one at the ATM across the street, but it’s too far back to pick up any details about the patrons inside the restaurant, especially with the sunlight reflecting off the glass walls.

The police still haven’t caught him. 

Curled up around her open laptop, Lydia falls asleep.

 

When she wakes up it’s with a violent jerk, as if something awful and sudden has roused her, but the room is as quiet and still as ever. She reaches for her phone, checking for missed calls and unread messages, but there’s nothing there, although it’s half past eight already and surely something must have happened in Albuquerque by now. When she turns back to her computer and logs in again, her own image— blurry and grainy, grabbed from closed-circuit footage, but unmistakably her— is plastered all over the CNN homepage. _Police Seek Woman In Hunt For Walter White_.

In a kind of horrified trance, Lydia scrolls down and sees photo after photo of herself sitting at The Grove, talking to Walt, talking to Todd. They must have been taken with a long lens from across the street. Someone must have been watching her for months. She’s so panicked that the accompanying text barely coheres before her eyes. They’ve identified her as Walt’s methylamine connection. The police, it says, are on their way to her home right now. She listens for sirens and hears them. Far off, but nearing. There would have been a window where she and Kiira might have been able to get away, but it’s passed.

“Delores,” Lydia says faintly, sitting down in the living room where she’s reading. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

Unable to say any more, she opens the laptop and places it in front of Delores. She feels like she did after Gus died, frozen stiff with fear, moving as if in a dream, but Delores only squints at the screen and shakes her head slightly.

“Is there something you want me to look at?”

“There,” says Lydia, pointing at the screen. “That’s me. They’ve found me, and I— I did all those things, and they’re coming right now. It says right there, they’re coming to the house to arrest me…”

Lydia rests her head in her hands and begins to sob.

“Lydia, this is just CNN,” Delores says gently. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What?”

“You say there’s something about you on here. I can’t see anything. It’s just the homepage.”

“That can’t be right,” Lydia pleads, but Delores is already touching her forehead with the back of her hand. She inhales sharply, sucking in a breath between her teeth, and Lydia blurrily wonders why her hand feels so cold.

“You’re burning up, Lydia. You’re seeing things.”

Lydia wants to argue with her, because the thought that she’s losing her grip on reality is almost as frightening as the thought of police at her door, but she knows Delores is probably right. It would explain why everything in the room seems so heavy that it’s overwhelming her with its weight. The sheer size of the canvas on the nearest wall is almost nauseating. She feels like a glass figurine next to it, tiny and easily crushed, like another coughing fit could break all her ribs and kill her.

“But it’s all right there…”

“Let’s go back to bed, hmm?” Delores says, gently helping her up. “Come on. Vámonos.”

The webpage looks exactly like it did before to her, but Lydia lets herself be led back down the hall, holding onto Delores’ arm. Even with support, she can barely stay on her feet, and her heart is still racing.

“Lie down,” Delores says. Lydia, not used to hearing her take control like this, is startled into obeying. “Did you take your temperature?”

“I was going to…”

The thermometer is still on the nightstand. Delores shakes her head at the reading when it flashes up.

“If it goes any higher, I think we should call a doctor, all right?”

Lydia’s beginning to think that might not be unwarranted, though she’s not completely sure that a doctor wouldn’t have the power to arrest her. She leans back against pillows that feel like stone. Maybe Delores says something about staying the night; her voice dissolves into the humidifier’s hiss. Lydia drifts off again.

  


It’s nearly half past eleven. She’d really rather not have to call Todd, not with Delores asleep just a couple of rooms away, not when she’s so feverish that her thoughts are all slippery and ungrounded, but her patience has run out and she wants nothing more than to get the matter over with and try to sleep. She dials and waits, curled into herself over a stray pillow. Normally Todd jumps to answer when she calls, even if he’s in the middle of something, but this time he seems to be taking forever.

“Pick up the phone,” Lydia mutters, massaging her forehead.

Finally, he answers. “Hello?”

“Is it done?” Lydia asks. “Is he gone?”

She realises, just a second too late, that something’s not right. That voice seems too deep for Todd. It strikes a wrong note; her heart begins to race.

“Yeah, it’s done,” says— no, it can’t be him, it can’t be, this is a bad dream, this is another hallucination. Lydia pushes herself up, and panic sets the room spinning again. “He’s gone. They’re all gone.”

“Todd? Who is this?”

“It’s Walt.” When he breathes, it’s a death rattle. He sounds at once very far away and like he’s right there in the room with her, whispering into her ear, making her skin crawl. “How are you feeling? Kind of under the weather, like you’ve got the flu?”

Lydia feels as if she’s falling, endlessly falling. _They’re all gone_ echoes in her head. She signed his death sentence, and now he’s telling her—

“That would be the ricin I gave you,” Walt says, and she barely hears the rest of it over the ringing in her ears.


	2. Chapter 2

All of a sudden, it seems very clear what Lydia has to do, but she’s about to drop the burner and dial 911 when she realises it has to be done in the right order. The sequence of events has to make sense, if she wants to survive this and stay out of prison. She clicks through to the messaging menu and keys in the number for her work cellphone, then shakily types a text message.

On the nightstand, her phone chimes. _Unknown, Tuesday, 11:24pm: You’ve been poisoned. Ricin in your tea._

Will that be enough? Her mystery attacker would want to taunt her like Walter White did, but her head is spinning and she can’t imagine what such a person would say. She flashes on those anthrax letters sent after 9/11, the crude printing, those mailroom workers who died, and feels violently sick. All she knows about ricin is tied up with assassinations and terrorist attacks (that’s what this is to him, she realises: an assassination) and she can’t remember whether it’s one of the ones that have antidotes, but then it occurs to her that if it were, he would never have told her what he’d used. Lydia lets out a frightened cry, her vision blurring with tears, and quickly dials. 

“Harris County 911, where’s your emergency?”

The dispatcher has a bored-sounding female voice, metallic and distorted.

“2102 Montclair Drive,” Lydia stammers. “University Place. I need an ambulance. I’ve been poisoned.”

“Can you tell me exactly what happened?”

“A man— someone just texted me saying I’ve been poisoned with ricin, they said they put it in my tea, I— I drank tea at a restaurant this morning and I’ve been sick all day.”

“Please hold for one second.” There’s a click, a faint tone. Things are happening. “I just need to confirm, you got a text message saying you’ve been poisoned?”

“Yes. With ricin.” She hopes that if she says _ricin_ enough times they’ll have to take her seriously.

“Do you know who sent you this message?”

“No, it’s… it’s anonymous, it says “number withheld”, I— I can’t find it on my phone…”

“Okay. And you said you’ve been sick today?”

“Yes,” Lydia says, desperate to get this point across. “Yes. I have a fever, I’ve been coughing, I can hardly stand up… I thought it was the flu, but now…”

“Are you having any trouble breathing?”

She is. That feeling of pressure, of crowding in her chest, like she can’t draw breath deeply enough no matter how hard she tries. She’d put it down to stress. She’s spent a whole day fretting about work while a deadly poison has been flowing through her system. She wants to scream.

“Yes,” Lydia sobs. “My chest feels tight. It’s like I can’t… oh, my God…”

“Okay, ma’am, I just need you to stay calm and answer a couple more questions,” the dispatcher says. There’s not a hint of alarm in her voice; it’s surreal, talking to a woman who sounds as if she hears this sort of thing every day. “Stay with me, okay? Is there anyone else in the house with you right now?”

“It’s just me and— and my daughter and our nanny…”

“All right, ma’am, I’m sending an ambulance. Can you go unlock your front door for me, please?”

After hanging up, with the front door open to the street, Lydia hurries back into her bedroom for the burner, takes out the sim card, and smashes it under the heaviest thing she can find and lift. She wraps the phone in a towel and stamps on it in her slippers until she hears glass cracking, then empties the fragments into the kitchen trash. The effort leaves her woozy and struggling for breath; she leans against the granite counter, trying to coax air into her lungs, and slides down to the floor. Her fingerprints are in Todd’s lab. _Her fingerprints are in Todd’s lab_. That’s all they’ll need.

“Miss Lydia?” Delores, in her pink embroidered nightgown and long braid, is standing a few yards away, woken by the noise. “Are you all right?”

Lydia doesn’t know where to begin, but now that she’s come up with a skeleton of a story, she’ll have to stick to it.

“Delores, I’m gonna need to go to the hospital,” she says, trying to stand up and thinking better of it. “Someone’s tried to poison me.”

 

When the ambulance arrives, Lydia tells the paramedics everything they need to know, and, feverish and petrified, a few things they don’t; but the one good thing about having a temperature of a hundred and four is that no one takes you very seriously. Your words float, weightless. You can say that a strange man in New Mexico spiked your tea with a deadly poison and the only part of that that anyone might believe is the poison part, and then only when the blood tests come back. For now, all they’re concerned with are her vital signs. They wrap a cuff around her arm and feel her pulse; someone slips the bell of a stethoscope under the lapel of her robe, making her gasp at the cold, and listens to her lungs. She gathers from their chatter that her blood pressure is through the floor, and she remembers from some far-off first aid class that that’s a sign of shock. Is that what’s happening to her? They’re running clear fluid through an IV into her arm before she’s even noticed the sting of the needle.

Blue lights are flashing outside, beating against the walls, over and over. The dispatcher sent a police car as well as an ambulance, but the two detectives have been hanging back, kept at bay by the whirl of activity around her. They intended to take a statement before realising how ill she was. Kiira is watching, clinging to Delores, petrified, and Lydia wants to tell her it’s going to be all right, but there’s too much going on around her and her head is swimming and the words just won’t come. One of the paramedics clips something to her finger, then someone else is holding an oxygen mask to her face and telling her to breathe. She tries to bat it away.

“Lydia? We’re just going to give you some—”

Lydia pulls the mask off and coughs into her hands, and suddenly there’s so much blood that someone shoves a cardboard basin in front of her. She can hear Kiira sobbing; she wishes Delores would take her away. She shouldn’t have to see this. Then it occurs to her that this might be the last time Kiira sees her alive, and a sharp horror pierces her chest.

“I need to talk to my daughter,” she manages to say, swallowing blood. “Kiira, honey, come here.”

Kiira scrambles into her lap, clinging for dear life, and Lydia fights not to cry out.

“They’re gonna take me to the hospital and I’m gonna be fine, okay?” Lydia chokes out, holding Kiira as tightly as she can with blood on her hands. “I love you so much, my darling. Please don’t be scared.”

 

Some part of Lydia, some brave, foolish part, isn’t really, truly frightened for her life until the ambulance lurches away from the curb and the siren starts. They only use the siren when things are really bad, she read once. Her eyes flood with tears; she never should have left Kiira’s side.

“Please don’t,” she pleads, when they start binding her to the gurney, pinning her with straps around her legs and hips and chest. “Please, I can’t— you can’t tie me up like this, I haven’t done anything, you have to let me move—”

“Lydia, you need to calm down. You’re breathing way too fast,” the EMT leaning over her says, meeting her eyes with some measure of sympathy, or pity.

“You can’t do this to me. I haven’t done anything…”

She’s silenced by some chemical shift in her blood that leaves her hands tingling and black spots swarming before her eyes. She gasps for air through the clammy mask. Her breathing is a ragged, helpless sound.

“You’re having an anxiety attack,” the EMT says. She’s about to insist that she isn’t, that this is the poison at work, but she realises both are true. She clenches her fists and concentrates, tries to pull herself together.

She always knew that one of the many men she worked with might kill her; she just never thought it would be like this, that it would leave her staring at the ceiling of a swaying ambulance as her body shut down. She thought it would be quick.

“I’m just so scared,” she admits between breaths. The words slip out unbidden. She can feel the EMT’s gloved hand on hers.

“We’re five minutes from the hospital,” he tells her. “Think about your little girl. Can you tell me her name?”

“Kiira,” Lydia chokes out.

“Think about Kiira. I know you must love her very much, and I could see how much she loves you, and she needs you to stay calm right now so we can take care of you. You can do that for her, right? Just five minutes, Lydia.”

“I can do that.”

Lydia closes her eyes. Lights are bleeding into the black behind her eyelids. Headlights, streetlights. She thinks she can feel where the ambulance is in space. She imagines it in terms of the path of a bullet, or a missile, or a capsule, like one of those Apollo modules she came within a few feet of on a trip to the space center when she was fourteen, falling to earth.

“That’s good,” the EMT says, referring to her breathing, she thinks. “You’re doing great. You’re gonna be fine. Just think about Kiira.”

“I’d do anything for her,” Lydia murmurs. Breathe in, breathe out. She’s a stranded pilot, strapped in, breathing through a mask, in freefall. “Anything.”

 

They give her a chest x-ray and a series of tests in the emergency room, then send her straight into the acute care area. Almost none of the hospital staff talk directly to her. They pass information about her between each other, over her head, distilling her and her predicament into a string of numbers: temperature, pulse, respiratory rate, white blood cell count, age, time since onset of symptoms. They give her a papery gown to change into and an incomprehensible registration form to fill out. She writes her date of birth, then has to cross it out and write it again. When she lays her head on the pillow and tries to rest, she sees vivid patterns budding in the dark. She imagines the room, with its neatly gridded ceiling tiles, as a geometric net of itself, folding up flat like a piece of paper.

“Ms. Rodarte-Quayle?” another doctor says, stepping into her cubicle. “I’m Dr. Carter. We think you have pneumonia. It’s very treatable, looks like we caught it early, but we’re a little concerned about your blood pressure and your oxygen levels, so we’d like to admit you for observation and get you started on some IV antibiotics, and…”

Did none of them hear her when she said she’d been poisoned? She’s been repeating it to anyone who will listen.

“It’s not pneumonia,” Lydia says, pushing herself up on her elbows, sitting up straight and looking him in the eye. “I was poisoned, with ricin. Please. You have to believe me. I know what this looks like, but you have to believe me.”

“Okay,” the doctor says, using that tone that tells her he’s been trained to humour patients who make outrageous claims like hers. “What makes you think you were poisoned?”

Lydia pulls out her phone and shows him the text. “This morning I drank tea at a restaurant. I’ve been sick ever since. I told the dispatcher, she— she sent a police car to my house— I thought this would have been on my chart…”

The doctor stares at the screen, pursing his lips, then reaches out to close the two-inch-wide gap in the cubicle curtain.

“Ms. Quayle, is there anyone you know who might want to hurt you?”

 

They page a toxicologist, who examines her, asks her to tell her story once again, and orders another set of blood tests. Lydia has always hated needles. “Almost done,” the nurse soothes, eyeing her vital signs on the monitor as she squirms, breathless and nauseated. “Just one more.”

Lydia can’t bear it any longer. She can feel and hear her heart rate falling. A shrill alarm starts to chirp.

“Okay, we’re done,” the nurse says, stopping whatever she was doing and raising the foot of the bed. Lydia’s drifting away. “Still with me? Ms. Quayle?”

“Please don’t take any more,” Lydia mumbles. She’s swung from hot to cold again. If she had the energy, she’d ask them for another blanket.

“Don’t worry, I think we’re good for now,” the nurse says, sounding distracted. “And I’m gonna get you set up with an EKG…”

Lydia hears her talking outside the cubicle, rattling off numbers, low and fast. 

She has to sit up and slip off her gown so that the nurse can place electrodes on her ribs and sternum. She’s tactful about it, but Lydia stiffens and tries to cover herself anyway, her lips pressed tightly together at this intrusion into her personal space. The cold air is acid-sharp against her skin. The nurse has to help her refasten the gown, pulling the sleeves over her aching shoulders and tying it in the back as she sits shivering. She tries to find a more comfortable position in bed, but she can’t curl up on her side without detaching the leads. She has to settle for lying on her back, which always makes her feel uncomfortably vulnerable no matter how many blankets are on top of her. 

“Can I have something for the pain, please?” Lydia asks.

The nurse glances at her chart and shakes her head sympathetically. “I’m sorry, I can’t give you anything unless one of the doctors orders it.”

“Seriously? Just a Tylenol or something…”

If she really did have pneumonia, she imagines, they’d be treating her by now, not mulling over her case in some pathology lab in the depths of the hospital. She would be out of the ER and into a darker, quieter room and they would be giving her medication. The poison, or rather the allegation of poison, is a snarl in their system. They lack a protocol for situations like this.

“I’m sorry,” the nurse says. “Someone should be around soon.”

 

It takes maybe fifteen minutes for the toxicologist to reappear, along with a colleague and another nurse.

“Ma’am, your blood test was positive for ricin metabolites,” the senior of the two doctors says, looking a little perplexed, as if instead of nodding he expects her to frown and ask him what ricin is and how such a thing could have happened to her.

“Okay,” Lydia says, vexed that they wasted valuable time doing the test in the first place. “Okay. Is there— is there an antidote?”

You can buy health, of course. You can buy anything in Houston, but especially health. That’s why the Medical Center is the size of a small city, why it sits fixed near the city’s heart like a pacemaker. People can do all kinds of things to themselves these days and still survive. Gus survived, didn’t he? Maybe someone just happens to be pioneering a new treatment for ricin poisoning here. What they actually explain to her is that there is no treatment anywhere in the world but they’re going to admit her straight into the ICU and she’ll get the best supportive care they can give her. What she actually understands is maybe fifty per cent of that, because she’s started to hallucinate again. There are black holes opening up in the walls and Mike is standing over her with a gun to her head, telling her that her time is up. He’s covering her mouth, trying to push her down into the pillow, and she doesn’t understand why the doctors aren’t doing anything—

“Ms. Quayle? I need you to calm down. Whatever you’re seeing, it isn’t real, all right?”

“Get him out of here,” she pleads, gesturing towards Mike as the doctors start to close in on her. “He tried to kill me. Twice. He— he’s got a gun—”

“Ms. Quayle, you’re safe here. Nothing’s going to happen to you. No one’s going to hurt you.”

“You don’t know that,” Lydia protests, but someone’s already rolling up her sleeve— “this is just Ativan, okay, it’s just going to calm you down”— and she feels the nip of the needle and stops struggling. Mike’s shadow weighs on her like lead, but she’s slipping down into that soft, cottony place where nothing can hurt her any more.

 

When she surfaces, she’s in a bright white room full of loud monitors and hurrying nurses, and she is drowning. She didn’t need to see the chest x-ray to know that her lungs are filling with a white cloud of fluid as the poison breaks down her cells; she can feel it happening with every painful breath she takes. Yet when the staff ask her if there’s anyone she wants them to call, it still takes her a few moments to work out what they mean. Their faces are awful masks of sympathy and resignation. When she asks how long she might have left, meaning really how long the process of her death will last, they put it in terms of hours.

“I want to see my daughter,” Lydia says. She imagines Kiira being woken and dressed and put in a car, clutching her favourite stuffed bear, pressing her face to the window as Delores drives through the alien night, and she starts to cry helplessly. There is no way she can possibly tell Kiira how much she is loved, but there is nothing else for her to say, and soon she won’t have anything to say at all, and the rest of the world will do the talking for her, and will remake her however they like, so that Kiira might one day come to believe that Lydia brought this on herself, by doing all the terrible things she’s done that seemed only reasonable or necessary when she did them. She won’t understand that all Lydia ever wanted was for them both to be safe, and that she wanted it so badly that she made mistakes, and when she realised her mistakes it was too late for her to turn back, so she kept going, on and on, until she met a bad man who killed her out of nothing but spite. Given time— years, perhaps— she could explain herself, but Kiira is so very young, and they only have a few hours left.

No one comes to comfort her, because she doesn’t have the strength to cry very hard. They only come when the alarm connected to her pulse oximeter starts going off and won’t stop no matter how deeply she tries to draw breath. Kiira and Delores can’t be more than ten minutes away, but nurses are appearing at her bedside with a trolley of equipment, flanked by a doctor who gives them rapid-fire instructions and injects something into her IV line, something stronger than Ativan. For a few moments, Lydia feels bathed in relief. She relaxes into the pillows and drifts, pleasantly blank, unconcerned by the alarm that rings at a higher pitch now that she isn’t working so hard to breathe. Someone leans over her, tilts her head back and positions her jaw to open her airway.

“Okay there, Lydia? You don’t want to be awake for this,” she hears, and it’s the last thing she hears for a long time.

  


When some form of consciousness returns to her, she finds herself standing on the deck of a boat, travelling upstream on a broad, iron-coloured river. The air is so thick with fog that she feels she could be underwater already. All she can see around her is grey, and in the distance, a darker blur that must be the riverbank.

“I know this place,” she finds herself saying, like an automaton, but as soon as she says it, it becomes true. She’s never been here before, but some part of her mind sings in recognition.

“You do,” says Gus, striding up beside her. “The question is: what are you going to do now?”

He looks as he always did. His features are unmarked and perfect. Lydia leans into him for warmth, feeling the wool of his coat lightly scratch her cheek. He’s so clearly alive that the past year must have been a bad dream.

“Well, first of all, I have to send another batch to Novák,” she says, counting on her fingers. “They go out every Thursday. He’ll notice if it’s delayed.”

“Your suppliers are all dead, Lydia.”

“I’ll find someone else.”

“From your hospital bed?”

Of course. She doesn’t exactly remember experiencing her illness, she just knows that it’s happening, somewhere else, maybe thousands of miles away, at the still centre of a storm of activity. The laminated hospital wristband she’s wearing, printed with her name and date of birth and date of admission, is proof of that. Yet there seems no contradiction between standing here talking to Gus and lying helpless in intensive care at the same time. 

“Am I dying?”

“Yes,” Gus says, brushing a lock of hair out of her eyes. “But you may yet survive.”

Lydia’s eyes brim with tears, not for herself but for Kiira.

“She’s only six,” she sobs. “She can’t lose me. I’m all she has.”

“I promised you I would take care of her if you ever came to any harm,” Gus says. His voice is endlessly gentle. “She’ll be provided for.”

“But there are so many things I wanted to tell her,” Lydia protests. She can’t put any of them into words, but they swarm and swarm in the echoing space inside her head.

 

She dreams that she’s walking in a foreign city with a curious topography. The streets writhe and intersect at odd angles, occasionally ending in chasms with nothing but filigree railings between her and a void. There are so many sheer drops that she gets nervous and tries to turn back, but the streets have rearranged themselves behind her, which seems natural and expected. She can only go on, brimming with the horror of falling. Someone in this labyrinth is calling her name.

 

“What’s the worst thing in the world, Lydia?” the toxicologist asks her, perched on a stool at her bedside in the emergency room. “What’s the very worst thing?”

“Don’t make me say it.”

“We have to know that you know it. Otherwise, we can’t help you.”

The floor is covered in blood. She doesn’t understand why no one seems concerned by that.

“I’m waiting, Lydia. What’s the worst thing a person could possibly do?”

“Don’t,” Lydia pleads, covering her ears. “Please. I don’t want to hear it.”

“You don’t want to hear it, or you don’t want to say it?”

“Both. Neither. I don’t want to think about it at all.”

“But you do think about it, don’t you?” the doctor says. She knows she can’t lie to him. They have machines that can see inside her, after all.

 

“They made me say it,” she cries, clinging to Gus, sickened and horrified. He strokes her hair to soothe her.

“Maybe you needed to say it,” he says. “Now you know exactly what you are.”

“You’re sounding like him.” They’re in an empty gallery. She glances at the nearest canvas and quickly turns away in revulsion. They’re all like that: all square close-ups of bodies that have been shot or cut or burned.

“You’re ill, Lydia. You aren’t hearing me correctly.”

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” Lydia mutters. She’s still hiding her face in his coat, listening to the slow, steady beat of his heart. “I want to get out of here.”

“Are you sure about that?” Gus asks. “Someone here is looking for you.”

It’s true. When she listens closely, she can hear them calling again: her name, blurred by distance into a single falling note. _Lydia. Lydia._

“I don’t care. I want to get out of here. Nothing makes sense.” When she was young and nothing made sense, she used to hide herself away in the smallest space she could find. Maybe that’s why someone’s trying to find her.

“Keep going,” Gus says, and then she’s back on the deck of the boat again, alone.

 

She steps onto the riverbank. It is paved with cold, slick cobblestones. A street winds its way under the hulking bridge and around to the mouth of an arch under a tower. The voice calling her name is getting closer and clearer. Her surroundings are so abstracted by thick fog that she could be walking through a city of paper cut-outs, but she keeps going, through the archway and onto the bridge.

It is lined with saints frozen in stone, and under one of the saints stands a small woman with long dark hair. Her face is turned towards the river, and her hand grips the hand of a child, a girl, in a dark velveteen dress with a white lace collar, of the kind which parents used to dress their little daughters in when she was four or five years old. _Lydia. Lydia._

Lydia moves closer. The little girl is in thrall to her mother. She can’t make out what the woman’s saying; her indistinct voice is as pure as laughter, as pure as song. Lydia keeps walking, transfixed.

The little girl looks up, pointing at a cloud of birds, and the woman turns with her, exposing her face, and Lydia stops dead, as if the three of them are clockwork figurines moving in sequence. She stares helplessly. Grief wells up in her chest until she could choke on it.

“Mom?”

 

She’s dragged out of her dream to loud voices and alarms, a dreadful cacophony that makes her think she must be dying, not coming back to life. There are people all around her, leaning over her, touching her, their heavy hands on her arms and legs and chest, all of them saying the same thing, over and over. Lydia doesn’t know what they want from her; she can’t understand a word. She can’t see, or move, or speak. She screams against the thick tube in her throat until they shoot something into her arm to make her stop.

 

“It’s time to go,” Mike says, walking into her room with a heavy black bag under his arm. The doctors and nurses are gone again, and the alarms are quiet. Lydia obediently gets up and follows him out. He leads her down a long corridor that turns into a tunnel, and at the end of the tunnel there’s nothing but desert and brutally blue sky.

“I can explain,” Lydia pleads, but he’s already shoving her onto her knees and pulling out his gun.

Again, she wakes up screaming.

 

“Ms. Quayle? Lydia? Can you tell me what year it is?”

Wherever she is now, the air is bright and white and painful.

“What happened?” Lydia whispers. The tube is gone, but the words feel like shards of glass in her throat. “What is this place? Where’s my daughter?”

“Ms. Quayle, you’re in the hospital. Just stay calm.”

She tries to move her arms and finds that they’ve put her in handcuffs. She fights against them, filled with horror. The police must have come for her in her sleep. There’s no telling where they might have taken Kiira. 

“Where’s my daughter?” Lydia repeats. “What did you do to her? Why isn’t she here? You have to let me go. You can’t just… you can’t do this to me…”

They let her go under again, and in time, she finds herself back in the desert. Of course: Mike didn’t shoot her, he just left her out here to die of thirst. He said something about her being a waste of a bullet. She can’t see anything but bare plain in any direction, but still she walks until she can’t take another step and crumples onto the scorched white ground. _Nobody’s going to find you, Lydia._ Of course.

“You’re making a mistake,” she mumbles, although Mike is long gone. She would have preferred the bullet.

It’s too bright out here. Much too bright. She tries to shield her eyes, but she’s so weak she can barely raise her hand. It takes her some time to tune into the voice of the woman who’s leaning over her, asking her questions, and she still thinks she can hear the blades of a helicopter thrumming overhead, as if someone’s come to rescue her after all.

“Ms. Quayle? Lydia? You’re in the hospital, okay? Do you remember what happened to you?”

It must have taken some sort of miracle for them to find her all the way out there, Lydia thinks, and then it all starts to come back to her in blurred fragments. The name _Todd_ wells up in her mouth and she swallows it back down, just in time. There was someone named Todd. Todd Alquist, the blond boy. Alq— no, Albuquerque, that’s where she got sick. The restaurant. The tea. The tea was drugged, or she’s drugged right now, or both. She can’t remember what city she’s in.

“I was poisoned,” she manages to say. The effort brings sweat to her brow. “I… I remember the ER. That’s all.”

Her voice doesn’t sound like her own any more. It’s dry and cracked like a flower stalk left out of water. There’s a sour taste in her mouth, and her throat feels raw. The pressure on her chest still lingers, though she no longer has the awful clawing feeling of not being able to get enough air. 

“I was handcuffed,” she adds, concentrating on the sensations in her wrists to make sure that they’ve freed her. “You had me in handcuffs. No one told me why…”

“Oh, no, no. We had to restrain your wrists yesterday because you were trying to pull out the tube. I think that’s what you’re remembering.”

Lydia doesn’t remember that at all.

“You’ve been very sick,” the nurse continues. “We’ve kept you sedated because you were on a ventilator for a while there, okay? It’s normal to feel confused—”

“How long?” Lydia whispers.

“It’s been a little over a week now. Nine days, actually. You came in last Wednesday morning. Today’s Friday.”

Nine days. Nine whole days, gone. Lydia feels dizzy just trying to understand it.

“That can’t be right.”

“Like I said, it’s normal to feel confused,” the nurse says. “It’ll pass. We’re still weaning you off of some of the meds. But yeah, you came in early on the seventh. Today’s the sixteenth.”

“When I was admitted,” Lydia says, her words coming slowly, “they told me… hours. Not days.”

“That’s what your doctors told us at the beginning. The first two days were, uh… after that, you started improving.”

“Am I still going to die from this?” Lydia has to ask.

“You pulled through the worst of it. I’m not your doctor, but I’d say you’re in the home stretch.”

Lydia’s almost too disoriented to be relieved. She feels only a few hours distant from Walter White telling her he’d poisoned her. Her mind is chaotic with impressions: a fever, a phone call, bright lights and needles, blood on the floor of the ER, a doctor asking her unspeakable questions, Kiira crying.

“Can I see my daughter?”

“We’ve already called Mrs. Gutierrez to tell her you were waking up. She’s going to bring your daughter back in as soon as you’re ready.”

“Wait, wait,” Lydia says, slowly processing that last sentence. “ _Back_ in?”

“They’ve been here every day since you were admitted.”

Lydia closes her eyes tightly, fighting back tears, and feels the nurse’s hand on hers.

“I’ll be back later to check up on you, okay? Try and rest.”

 

It seems that she’s only drifted off for a second when she hears Kiira’s voice, but she barely has the strength to turn her head. Nine days of sleep and she still feels like she’s been run over by a truck.

“Honey, come here,” she whispers, meaning the narrow slice of space between her stranded body and the edge of the bed. Kiira climbs over the railing and latches onto her— “Careful, my girl, be careful,” Delores says, mindful of the tubes and the wires trailing away from her in every direction— and Lydia breathes her in. Her smile hurts the cracked corners of her mouth; tears are spilling hot into her hair. For a moment she feels newly made, fire-forged, perfect.

“Mommy!” Kiira wails, overwhelmed. Lydia tries to put her arms around her and is shocked by how much effort it takes.

“I missed you so much,” she whispers, stroking Kiira’s hair. “Don’t cry, honey. I’m right here.”

 

She doesn’t let go of Kiira until a young aide passing by exchanges a few words with Delores and offers to take Kiira to a waiting room where there are books and toys. Delores closes the curtains around Lydia’s bed and sits back down with a heavy sigh. She looks exhausted.

“What did you tell her it was?” Lydia asks.

“I said sometimes people get sick and the doctors don’t know why,” Delores says. Her face is pale and drawn. Lydia tries to imagine how many hours she must have spent here, how many impossible questions Kiira must have asked her.

“Thank you.”

“I had no idea what else to say.”

“No, you were right to say that,” Lydia murmurs. “I don’t want her knowing that… someone tried to hurt me.”

She can tell from Delores’ expression that she has a lot of questions she isn’t asking, and she’s thankful for that. She can start unravelling the knot of what happened to her once her head clears. For now, she can barely keep her eyes open. Delores carefully squeezes her hand, and she grips back as well as she can.

“Thank you for taking care of us.”

 

She has no sense of what time of day it is until the consultant decides she’s stable enough to be moved to an intermediate care unit and they put her in a private room with a window. The sun is just below the horizon, tinting the sky pink, and the city’s lights are starting to glitter all the way out to the beltway and beyond. If she could clutch that view in her hands like a child’s comfort blanket, she would. She falls asleep to it, and doesn’t wake until a doctor comes in; except instead of going to her side for observations, he holds the door open for two other people.

“How are you feeling, Ms. Quayle? Think you can handle a couple of visitors?”

They’re a man and a woman she doesn’t recognise in smart dark suits, and for a surreal moment she thinks someone from work must have sent them here in search of her input on some issue or another, but then they take out their badges.

“Good evening, Ms. Quayle. I’m Agent Jaye Roberts, this is Agent John Silva. We’re with the FBI.”

Lydia shrinks back against the pillows, her heart racing.


End file.
